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mst3kproject · 8 years ago

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422: The Day the Earth Froze

The Kalevala is sort of the Iliad of Finland. As the opening narration of The Day the Earth Froze explains, in the middle of the 19th century a philologist named Elias Lönnrot compiled a collection of folklore and oral poetry into a single epic, which went on to become a major cornerstone of Finnish national identity. There's a Lemminkäinen Construction Group and a Sampo National Bank, towns called Kalevala and Pohjola, and things like Ilmarinen Streets all over the place. February 28th is Kalevala Day. It's a big damn deal.

Before I started this review, I did some thinking about whether I ought to read the poem before I tackled the movie. I ended up deciding against it for a couple of reasons. First, because a movie ought to stand on its own: part of its purpose is to bring the story to a new audience. If you can only understand the movie because you're already familiar with the source material, it has failed both as an adaptation and as a piece of art in its own right. I am therefore going into The Day the Earth Froze unspoiled by the poem, and will see what I can make of it.

Second, the Kalevala is fifty percent longer than the Iliad and would probably have taken me months to read. That was also a constributing factor.

The Day the Earth Froze is a fairy tale: a bunch of old guys in pajamas want Ilmarinen the blacksmith to build them a Sampo, a magical object that can produce gold, grain, and salt. It cannot be forged, however, without heavenly fire, which belongs to the witch Louhi (she keeps it in a cow skull for some reason). It just so happens that Louhi wants the Sampo for herself, so she kidnaps Ilmarinen's sister Annikki and refuses to let her go except in exchange for the Sampo. With no choice, Ilmarinen builds it, and then takes his sister home while her boyfriend, Lemminkäinen, goes back to destroy the Sampo. Louhi takes revenge by crashing Lemminkäinen and Annikki's wedding and stealing the Sun. The men of Kalevala must find a way to defeat her and force her to return it, or the world will come to an end in darkness and cold.

(If you're thinking that all the names in the movie sound like they came from the Silmarillion, that's because Tolkien loved the way Finnish sounded and used parts of its phonology and grammar as inspiration for the Elvish language Quenya. Also, you're a nerd.)

The original film, called simply Sampo, was ninety minutes long. Quite a bit of it was cut when they dubbed it into English as The Day the Earth Froze, and a little more chopped out by the MST3K people. In addition to the English version, I managed to find one in the original Finnish with rather sparse subtitles. I'm sure I missed a lot of the nuances of the dialogue that way, but I got to see the stuff that wasn't in the episode and boy howdy, some of it was weird.

For example, that bit of dialogue between Annikki and Lemminkäinen when they flirt a moment before his log floats away? Not in the original. I'm guessing AIP dubbed that in because they thought it was creepy that these two fall in love without ever even learning each other's names. In an unusual move for American International Pictures, they were right. It's even creepier when both parties run straight home to their families to rave about this pretty person they know absolutely nothing about.

Did you wonder how Lemminkäinen found out that Louhi had taken Annikki? I kinda did. Turns out it's because Annikki sent him a magical telegram made of hair, which gives him a vision causing him to shoot a taxidermied eagle with an arrow (I promise you, the scene is even stranger than you're imagining). This, unfortunately, raises a new question: did Louhi have a way of delivering her ransom demand, or was she counting on Annikki to pull some Disney Princess magic out of her ass? What if it hadn't occurred to Annikki to throw a lock of hair out the window? What if Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen just concluded she fell out of her boat and got eaten by a shark or something? The extra material actually makes less sense.

Then there's the entire subplot they cut out, at least ten or fifteen minutes of movie in which Lemminkäinen gets his ass kicked by Louhi and his mom has to come to his rescue. See, after Lemminkäinen returns to Pohjola for the Sampo, the witch tricks him into dropping his sword (after failing to trick him into drinking a flagon of frogs) and then puts a snake down his shirt. He passes out from the venom, and the trolls throw his body off a cliff. Luckily the sun was watching – it informs our hero's mother of this, and she straight-up walks across the sea, no explanation whatsoever, commands the ocean to spit him back up, and walks home again carrying him like a tea tray!

Holy shit. Why didn't they send her to get the Sampo back? She could just walk in and put it in her fucking purse! What's going to stop a woman who can give orders to the sea?

Once Le Mom Käinen gets her son's corpse back to Kalevala, the Tree and the Road who refused to help her earlier take pity and give her magical sap and dirt to bring him back to life. So after all that, how does he thank her for bringing all her awe-inspiring superpowers to bear in saving his life? Why, he goes right out and does the thing that got him killed again, returning to Pohjola to destroy the Sampo! I hope she grounded him.

Like The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, The Day the Earth Froze was directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, and it's interesting to compare the two films. The Day the Earth Froze has less of the distinctly operatic feel that was such a part of Magic Voyage, but it is not completely absent. There's very little of it, to be sure, in the opening sequences, which are shot in the countryside with an emphasis on the great outdoors as a sort of rural paradise. We see thick woods, rushing rivers, herds of goats, and get an idea of a rustic but prosperous community. Something similar happens at Annikki and Lemminkäinen's wedding: dancing outdoors and crowds of extras for a more naturalistic feel.

This contrasts with the way things are depicted in Pohjola, where Louhi and her trolls make their home. Here the sets look more like sets, and there is a greater use of painted backdrops – when Joel and the bots describe the field of snakes as 'an El Greco', they've got the right idea. The Land of Kalevala is supposed to be a version of the real world. It is romanticized and idealized, but the audience ought to be able to imagine themselves going about an ordinary life within in, complete with the hard work necessary to a pastoral existence. It is important that all three of the main characters are introduced while doing work: Lemminkäinen is cutting wood, Annikki is doing laundry, and Ilmarinen is working in his forge.

Pohjola, on the other hand, is part of a fantasy, a land of witches and trolls, and looks correspondingly less real. This extends for the most part to the actions of the characters. Ilmarinen could not build the Sampo in Kalevala, because it required something (the heavenly fire) only available in the fantasy land of Pohjola. In Kalevala, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen must chop a boat out of a tree. In Pohjola, they are able to forge one in the same fire Ilmarinen already used to make a horse! And the fantastic Sampo cannot be brought back to the real world of Kalevala in its magical form. All Lemminkäinen can bring back is a piece of it, which will bring undefined 'good luck' instead of material gold or grain. When Ilmarinen tries, in Kalevala, to forge a new sun to replace the one Louhi took away, he is told he cannot succeed.

Perhaps this is another reason why the sequence with Lemminkäinen's mom was cut out for the American audience – it is a departure into the purely fantastical, and jars with the otherwise more realistic portrayal of Kalevala. It also doesn't really affect the plot at all, as illustrated by how easily it is excised in a chunk and how nothing seems to be missing from the narrative as a result. I presume it was in the movie because it was in the poem, but it doesn't do much. Imagine the Lord of the Rings movies had included the sequence with Tom Bombadil. Yeah, it would have been nice for the fans to see, but it doesn't give us anything that recurs in the story, it would have killed the rising tension, and those unfamiliar with the books would have been left sitting there wondering what the hell they just watched. Annikki's hair telegram does foreshadow the existence of some mild magic in the 'real' world, but the feats of Le Mom Käinen are way beyond that.

The effects used to present these real and unreal worlds are often quite good. Louhi's cloak sailing along on the wind looks very creepy and purposeful. The only time it's really silly is when Lemminkäinen fights it off. The chained-up winds are quite (pardon me) atmospheric, dangling ominously from the cave ceiling as they do – I like that the North Wind's bag is covered in icicles. The burning horse looks just unearthly enough and the Sampo doesn't look like anything in particular, which helps it remain a little mysterious even when it's right there grinding out gold. The matte paintings that represent Kalevala buried in snow are a little unreal-looking themselves, but perhaps they represent the fantasy world of Pohjola intruding into the real one of Kalevala, where it can do nothing but harm.

As weird as the movie is, I really did enjoy The Day the Earth Froze, and I'm actually kind of looking forward to watching The Sword and the Dragon now. You guys can also expect to see Aleksandr Ptushko in the Episodes that Never Were section sometime, not because his films are bad but because I really want to see more of them.

#mst3k #reviews #the day the earth froze #50s #just fuckin weird #russofinnish coproduction

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